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Night of the Republic

An urgent and timely collection by one of America’s most inventive and accessible poets

In Night of the Republic, Alan Shapiro takes us on an unsettling night tour of America’s public places—a gas station restroom, shoe store, convention hall, and race track among others—and in stark Edward Hopper–like imagery reveals the surreal and dreamlike features of these familiar but empty night spaces. Shapiro finds in them not the expected alienation but rather an odd, companionable solitude rising up from the quiet emptiness.

In other poems, Shapiro writes movingly of his 1950s and 60s childhood in Brookline, Massachusetts, with special focus on the house he grew up in. These meditations, always inflected with Shapiro’s quick wit and humor, lead to recollections of tragic and haunting events such as the Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of JFK. While Night of the Republic is Shapiro’s most ambitious work to date, it is also his most timely and urgent for the acute way it illuminates the mingling of private obsessions with public space.

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About the Author:

Alan Shapiro is the William R. Kenan Jr. Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of nine acclaimed books of poetry. He is a former recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Award and the Los Angeles Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was recently elected as a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Over the lot a sodium aurawithin whichabove the new cars spraysof denser many-colored brightnessesare rising and falling in a time lapseof a luminous and ghostlygarden forever flourishingup out of its own decay.

The cars, meanwhile, modest as angelsor like angelichoplites, are arrayedin rows, obedient to ordersthey bear no trace of,their bodies taintless, at attention,serving the sheen they bear,the glittering they are,the sourceless dazzlethat the showcase windowthat the showroom floorweeps forwhen it isn’t there—

like patent leather, even the black wheels shine.

Here is the intenseamnesia of the just nowat last no longer longingin a flowering of lightsbeyond whichone by one, haphazardlythe dented, the rusted through,metallic Eves and Adamshurry past, as if ashamed,their dull beams averted,low in the historical dark they disappear into.

Supermarket

The one cashier is dozing—head nodding, slack mouth open,above the cover girl spread out before her on the countersmiling upwith indiscriminate forgivenessand compassion for everyonewho isn’t her.

Only the edgeis visible of the tightly spooledwhite milesof what is soonto be the torn-off-inch-by-inch receipts,and the beam of green light in the black glassof the self-scannerdrifts free in the space that is the sumof the cost of all the items that tonightwon’t cross its path.

Registers of feeling too precisetoo intricate to feelexcept in the disintegratingtraces of a dream—panopticon of camerascutting in timed processionfrom aisle to aisleto aisle on the overhead screensabove the carts asleep inside each other—above the darkenedservice desk, the pharmacy, the nursery,so everywhere inside the storeis everywhere at onceno matter where—eternal rerunsof stray wisps of steamthat risefrom the brightly frozen,of the canned goods and foodstuffsstacked in columns onto columnsunder columns pushed togetherinto walls of shelvesof aisles all celestially effacingany traceof bodies that have pickedpacked unpacked and placedthem just soso as to draw bodies to thepyramid of plums,the zigguratsof apples and peaches andin the bins the nearly infinitegradations and degrees of greensmisted and sparkling.

A paradise of absence,the dreamed-of freedfrom the dreamer, bodilessquenchings and consummationsthat tomorrow will draw the dreamerthe way it draws the night tonightto press the giant black mothof itself against the windowsof fluorescent blazing.

Park Bench

Behind the bench the drive,before the bench the river.Behind the bench, white lightsapproaching east and westbecome red lightsreceding west and eastwhile before the bench,there are paved and unpavedpathways and a grassy field,the boathouse, and the playground, and the gardensof a park named for a man whomno one now remembersexcept in the forgetting that occurswhenever the park’s name is said.Left of the bench there is a bridgethat spans the riverand beyond the bridge around a bendfloodlights from the giant dry goodsthat replaced the bowling alleythat replaced the slaughterhouseare dumping fire all night longinto the river; but herewhere the bench is,the river is black, the riveris lava long past its cooling,black as nightwith only a few lightsfrom the upper story of the trapezoidalfive-star hotel across the waterglittering on the waterlike tiny crystals in a black geode.Haunt of courtship,haunt of illicit tryst; of laughteror muffled scream, whateven now years latermay be guttering elsewhere on the neuralfringes of a dream, all thisthe bench is empty of,between the mineral river that it facesand the lights behind it speeding whiteto red to white to red to white.